We see a lot of free plus shipping offers in the health and natural supplement market. These are a necessary offer for the way their business models work and they really are a great offer for cold traffic.
It’s quite a simple business model actually. Offer a loss leader intro product where you’ll go negative on the first order, while trying to make up for the loss in the one time offer funnel that immediately follows the offer. While getting buyers that are also added to a monthly subscription usually of the exact same product.
The challenges of the free plus shipping offers are usually the same across the board:
Do you show shipping up front or hold it back until the order page?
How do you get over the hurdle of the monthly continuity that’s attached to make the offer work?
Thrive Market has an interesting twist on the model, let’s take a look.
First, their front end offer is pretty irresistible.
You get a free 15oz jar of virgin coconut oil, a retail value of $25 for only $1.95 in shipping.
This is a very low shipping price for such a heavy item to ship and it’s low in general from the usual $5.95 and up shipping prices usually seen on supplement bottles.
We’ve done some shipping price split-testing at Creative Thirst on these type of free plus shipping offers before and it is difficult to make the numbers work at such a low shipping amount, plus from our tests it has not moved the needle enough to win over a higher shipping price.
Now, there could be many reasons why this offer might work for Thrive. Their take rates might be better than average, and/or their stick rates might be longer than the average 2-3 months.
But what ever the case, what they do after you become a lead and take the first step towards becoming a buyer is pretty interesting.
Normally the strategy on a free plus shipping offer is to lead the buyer down a very structured funnel to buy more products in the form of bump offers, up sells and down sells in an effort to increase the average order value towards a self liquidating offer. The next step of the typical journey is to the order / cart page to capture the payment for the shipping but Thrive instead takes the prospect to a welcome overlay.
With a message that their Free jar of Coconut Oil is in the cart waiting for checkout rather than taking them direct to the cart.
Normally this would not be good, because you’re giving the prospect an opportunity to get distracted and exit your funnel without converting to a buyer.
Perhaps this is not working as well as it could for Thrive, I hope they are testing alternative funnels.
But here’s where the interesting part comes in.
On that same welcome overlay they offer additional savings with an offer of up to 65% Off todays order if you continue shopping.
This is similar to the traditional bump add on and up sell strategy used in free plus shipping offers.
But the difference is that instead of leading the visitor down a rigid structured funnel they are taking them to their eCommerce store to browse and ‘choose their own adventure’ or rather choose their own up sells.
The reason why the offer works for Thrive is because of their business model and the amount of products they sell. (They have a lot of SKUs.)
Plus they are tacking on a continuity subscription of $59.95 a month to your order, with a Free 30 Day Membership to the Thrive Community.
Again this is a pretty standard element to the free plus shipping offer in order to make the numbers work.
Their Coconut Oil offer fits perfectly with their business model, and the beauty of it is that they can resin the offer and substitute Coconut Oil with any of they products, giving them a much larger footprint to capture buyers.
So what’s their business model?
Thrive Market is an online shopping club on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone.
Thrive Market members can buy the best-selling healthy foods and wholesome products in everyday sizes, always up to 50% off retail prices.
Their value proposition for joining is also pretty strong.
If you don’t make your membership fee back in savings by the end of the year, Thrive will automatically give you the difference in Thrive Market credit after you renew.
But they don’t stop marketing at their welcome message.
After you click to close the lightbox, with a subtle nudge form the Call to action button copy to Continue Shopping. You’re presented with a very clear message on what to do next.
Save an extra 15% right now on your first order and get free shipping on orders over $49.
They continue you down the buying mode with the urgency of even more savings right now.
With the open loop of the item in your cart, they leave the visitor to explore on their own to get right into the experience of shopping on Thrive. In fact the entire front end experience is designed to onboard you rather than a traditional free plus shipping funnel. By default a prospect creates an account and gets you into their sign up process.
There’s a lot to learn from this funnel but the big take away is that they aligned the funnel with with their business model rather than simply look to gain a buyer like so many other free plus shipping funnels.
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The problem is most dietary supplement companies only have one funnel. Through our work in the online health space, we’ve had the opportunity to observe hundreds of health businesses. What we’ve uncovered are the three critical funnels that each work together that make the difference between the average supplement company just selling on Amazon and a multi-million dollar health empire and compiled our findings in the book below. Click here to get the ebook delivered right to your email for FREE.
